Peter S. Rand, PhD

Research Ecologist

Pete is a research ecologist with experience working in a variety of freshwater, estuarine and marine environments. He holds a PhD in ecology and has focused most of his career on studies of salmon biology and life history. His work has helped advance conservation and fisheries management. He attended Colgate University, and received his graduate degrees from State University of New York, and was a postdoc at University of British Columbia. He served on the faculty at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and was the Conservation Biologist at the Wild Salmon Center in Portland, Oregon before joining the staff at the Prince William Sound Science Center in the spring of 2015. In recent years Pete has been leading studies of salmonids endemic to Asia, including taimen and masu salmon, in Japan, Russia and China. He volunteers as the Chair of the IUCN Salmonid Specialist Group, a small, international group focused on advancing conservation and management, and increasing public awareness, of threatened fishes in the salmon family across the world. At PWSSC he is leading studies of interactions between wild and hatchery Pacific salmon, conducting research on migration behavior, energetics, and health of sockeye salmon populations in the Copper River, and conducting acoustic surveys of Pacific herring in Prince William Sound.